Read Online The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest - Free Book Online Page A

living with his girlfriend and their baby. He was seen as a man with questionable morals. He was determined his success would be based on his ideas and his policies, and not on his personal life – or on the version of himself that he was expected to sell to the press – but that determination made him an easy target. He refused to fall in line or scrub up or blend in, he was vitriolic about Westminster. His message was clear: things have to change, we are in a stateof emergency! He didn’t want to be another baggy-mouthed puppet in the popularity contest, lined up against the wall before the press like it was execution day.
    He kept going, touring the country in a beaten-up van, sleeping in the back on a half-frozen mattress in supermarket car parks. Driving through the night, guts ruined from motorway burgers and cheap, thick whisky. He was out to make a difference. He couldn’t bear what was happening to the world. To his country. It was just a question of information, he was sure. People just had to know and that would be a start. Instead of smashing up the football stadiums, we could be smashing up the institutions that were keeping us in this misery. If people just
knew
that what was happening was not the only option, and even if it was, know that it wasn’t
right
.
    He was sick of seeing the people pitted against each other, black against white and north against south, and so many were dying and poor, beaten up, demonised and kept in a state of dejection. He couldn’t rest, not for a moment. He could see so clearly what the government and the multinational corporations were doing: enslaving the country in the name of freedom and getting away with it. He was teaching the brightest students he’d ever taught; they were coming in droves to politics. It was a time of great upheaval and chance and chaos and pain.
    He was going about things the only way he could trust. Grass roots. Driving all day to talk with a hundred hungry young men who couldn’t find work, and then driving allnight back to London to teach his classes in the morning. He went to the people, with no cameras, and no story to sell. He put himself in front of single mothers, office workers, immigrants and prisoners and talked and listened, and it gave them hope.
    While John toured the country and passed out exhausted to snatch a few hours’ fitful sleep on the floor of his university office, Paula and Becky lived in the flat and spent their days together. The weed didn’t grow on the balcony now. They had to cut the precious plants down for fear of the press or arrest. There was a lot that Paula couldn’t do any more; she couldn’t gossip with her neighbours in her dressing gown, or go out dancing with her girlfriends. She couldn’t sit topless in the sunshine on her balcony. Their lives were not their lives, they belonged to John’s job and to the looming shadow of potential public disfavour.
    But she could watch her daughter and feel the surge and peace of motherhood. She watched the fingers grow, the toes, the legs, the tiny eyelashes.
My baby is growing
. All things repeated this.
I have a child. She is a girl
. Paula would pick up her camera occasionally, turn it over in her hands, change the shutter speed, raise it to her eye and look through it, but each time, before she could decide on a shot, the baby would be hungry, or need her attention, and the camera would feel like an indulgence. The notion of ‘making it’ seemed so trivial. What was important was Becky being occupied, happy, warm.Becky learning words. Becky painting. Becky’s hunger, Becky’s thirst, Becky sleeping well. The fury of her creative pursuits belonged to a different person. She often thought about it, intensely, while doing the endless cleaning up, washing of clothes, changing of nappies, cooking of food; did she miss it? She couldn’t honestly say that she did.
    John would come home at nights with a deep, furrowed brow. He seemed emptied of something. He barely